Reading all about the people he is chosing fornhis cabinet and surrounding himself with is just sappingeverything out of me. I was feeling good about the movement against his bulltshit, but today all of it feels for nothing.

Ivanka being in the same room is leading me to believe that he'll get impeached over bullshit like that than like actual human right violations that he has promised to do.

It's so great, yet heartbreaking to watch George Takai being so vocal about having this shitty country remember the Japanese internment camps. He's risking his self being and his mental health to remind us of atrocities that this country committed.

It will be interesting to see where and when the impeachment talk really starts. Trump will have to be unpopular in his own party for it to really get anywhere, and so far all these pieces of shit seem to be fine with him.

I can't imagine how he feels hearing the fucking incoming President's surrogates say things like that. Internment camps are a horrible, dark part of America's past, not one that can be turned to as precedent for anything other than how shitty the US government has been to its own people. Between this and the Muslim registry... if Republicans actually meant what they said about loving and living the constitution, they would be distancing themselves from this asshat so hard. But no. They are fucking transparent, racist pieces of shit striving to hold on to their power in any way that they can.

What makes it even worse is the same "progressives" hammering about how dems failed to hold the white working class hand aren't saying much of anything about the role voter suppression (closing 800 voting locations, ID laws, etc) played in this election.

I agree. Our country hides the internment camps for the most part in history courses. It's a bad look at us, at our actions, and self-reflection isn't a key component to American ideology. I was in a post-1945 history class in college (that mostly stuck in the 1960s for like a month, even though we have a course JUST for the 60s).

One of the white guys in the class said his grandpa worked at a camp during the war. Hand to god he said "and they [the Japanese] really liked being in there." I think my jaw dropped for about 5 minutes. My liberal white professor was like "really", all interested. I was sickened at the promotion of this. What, were the forcibly instituted minorities supposed to break down doors at every turn to try and get out? What the fuck, America.

I lost a lot of respect for my teacher during that conversation and she's never gotten it back. And I made a point to speak up and point out the Japanese didn't have any choice in the matter. He and she replied that "Well, they were safer there than from their Japanese relatives overseas." I felt really ill, sick to my stomach.

I'm all for bettering the lives of the WCW through mutually beneficial programs and initiatives, but absolutely NOT at the cost of innocent PoC. ABSOLUTELY NOT. It is beyond immoral, depraved, and #deplorable to implicitly or explicitly give this administration your seal of approval with a vote. These people must, MUST, be met with resistance and shaming at every turn.

I want to believe it won't make it through the first draft but with all these Republicans in charge, I really don't know.

Seeing that frat boy Chris Kyle wannabe "veteran" talking about Japanese internment as precedent made my skin crawl. That guy had such evil in his heart and cable news just gave him a platform to air it out. Thank God for Van Jones.

I'm sick of people with nothing of worth and fuck all credentials being given a platform for the sake of debate and "muh free speech". Milo whatshisface was on C4 news last night and literally admitted his whole MO is to troll and get a laugh. At least have someone with a position they can argue on. That way you might have a point when you say we need to hear from both sides so we can show up those with shitty views.

I would never say Clinton is perfect, but the thing that's important to remember is that even with all her baggage, having that bomb dropped on her by Comey, all those fake news stories from teenagers in Macedonia, and interference from Russia she still won the popular vote. I know that's cold comfort now, but that's just to say that I don't think the DNC needs to go crazy and overthink this.

Honestly taking a big step back the lesson I'm taking from this is that to the vast majority of people policy doesn't matter as long as you have an engaging candidate. I think Clinton would have made a great president but in this "post-factual" (*shudder*) society, people only care about what they feel and they want someone with a big personality to convince them to vote for them.

The thing I super agree with you on is the DNC bringing in fresh talent. The less political baggage and the bigger the personality the better apparently.

I remember before Obama was elected, I was on a music forum which now has a fair amount of miserable alt-righters. Those black and white pics of Obama with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth was posted, and people there loved it. He looked like a movie star and they responded. He's very photogenic which his team used well. I also think voters loved the idea of Obama smoking weed during college. He was human and relatable in that way. People keep going on about the white working class, but it was the white college middle-class who really voted for Trump. They're the fratboy weed demo who responded to Obama's personality imo.

There are so many factors that led to this result and blaming one over the other will ensure that nothing will change. There needs to be a frank, honest discussion ASAP. I'm just not sure too many people are capable of understanding without using false equivalence (Hillary is just as corrupt as Trump, etc) or trying to placate obviously racist language. It's also going to be really difficult to win back these rural working class voters without alienating PoC.

ITA re: neoliberalism too. We have neocons so why not also call out the quasi-leftist version of that? Democrats also profit from the military/prison industrial complexes. The Clinton admin in the 90s is a perfect example; outside of differing on a few social issues, they've been guilty of a lot of awful shit, the crime bill being the most obvious one. Also, a lot of the bank deregulations started under Clinton & continued under Bush, leading to the market crash in 2008. Everyone had a hand in how things ended up. That's another discussion altogether though. The DNC needs to be overhauled and the old guard has to step down. Candidates that actually represent the voter base and don't carry any political baggage should be the future of the party.

"That people, including ironically Bernie stans, could decide that their own moral purity mattered more than their civic responsibility to their nation and the world to keep Trump out of the Oval Office is actually in and of itself part of a larger capitalist culture of cruelty which is why I find the whole thing sad and ironic - the very people who hate this corporate culture have in fact been raised and influenced by it in ways they're not even aware of. It's almost Shakesparean."

I've really admired all of your comments in this post-election mess. I absolutely agree with you on all counts. I wish more voices like yours' were being elevated in the media because post-election, we're hearing too much from people who want to wave away racism and its role in this election because they worry that talking too much about it will alienate the "white working class." Every explanation so far focused either purely on economic grievances or purely on racism and not on the interplay. I think it is clear that it was mostly racism motivated by economic grievances

Then you HAVE to take seriously the fact that there are parts of the country that should be neutral but have explicitly played a role in electing Trump. Certain people are downplaying the role of Comey and saying that Hilary's camp is just 'whining' about Comey instead of looking at themselves. To say this is to miss how significant it is that the FBI and various other institutions seem dedicated to supporting fascism. People can't just dismiss this because to acknowledge Comey's role would validate the true notion that not everything that went wrong in this election is all Hilary and the DNC's fault.

I think a lot of people are doing this because admitting that it was a matter of pretty arbitrary and uncontrollable outside events (like Comey's announcement) and just racism and identity-based grievances takes control away from us. If the problem is "economic anxiety," we can do something concrete to change it. We can change our messaging more to focus on economic issues. However, if the problem is racism, what are the Democrats supposed to do? Become more racist? The thing is, Hillary lost by a tiny margin and obviously, didn't even lose the popular vote. This was not some sort of major repudiation of her by this country by any means. If she had lost in a landslide, perhaps we could say there was a systemic problem with her campaign. But given how little she lost by, I think it's likely that it was more a matter of things that few people had control over. We don't want to admit that because it makes us feel powerless.

Is there any kind of script being used for this as to how to phrase concerns in a way that makes sense? I kind of ramble when I'm on the phone and fired up about something. I want them to take my voice seriously.

can I ask how old you are?(not being condescending or sarcastic at all)i'm 29 and we definitely did not learn about this in our US history class..being Asian American..I only learned about it via independent research when I was in middle school

I don't believe my curriculum got up to the Cold War, but I'm old enough to remember the tenor of post-Cold War culture, and my teachers were old enough to remember it. I wonder if today's 20-somethings even understand why we keep talking about Russia.

We did a huge unit on it during middle school history because there was Japanese-Canadian internment as well (late 90s). I did hear from a friend who used to go to school in Tennessee that they barely covered the main points of slavery in the US, so I'm not surprised many people aren't aware of what happened to Japanese-Americans. It really depends where you went to school.

American but we didn't learn about it. We covered the entire war in 3 class periods. That was it. So anything that looked deeper wasn't happening. I went to a metro-Atlanta school from 96-2000. It wasn't considered important enough for testing, so nothing else was added. And I had a damned good teacher for that course, too. She taught us how to take bullet points and focus on the important information...but we ran out of time. We covered the Korean war in 1 day. Anything controversial in world politics wasn't discussed.

I didn't learn about it in history classes at all, but we had to read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes in english class and our teacher gave us background info on Hiroshima/WWII and also included the Japanese internment camps. Some students also have to read Farewell to Manzanar in school and learn about it through that.

I think I learned about it from some episode of Cold Case when I was a teen... I'm not American either but I know how many things from the WW2 are still not talked about in my country. I wonder if that will change when that generation passes.

We learned about it in US History and we read Farewell to Manzanar in english. I went to a hs in California and 80% of my school was Asian. I was so incredibly shocked when we learned it and I know a lot of people that were never taught about it which I think is really really disgusting.

I think that's because Hitler is known for World War II and the Holocaust and that's what everybody is thinking about. But Hitler didn't get elected and fired up the ovens within 24 hours so the historical end is overshadowing the beginning .

The New York Times published an awesome book review about the rise of Hitler, and it was obvious the author was drawing parallels to Trump. She never once alluded to the U.S. election, either. It's just there. History repeating itself. I definitely recommend you read it:

I have to say I for once am really impressed with the German media's reaction to Trump: The overwhelming response has been: "Hold up, Trump is a fascist and surrounds himself with white supremacists. This is real and dangerous, listen to us, we've been here before."

I kept trying to point it out and people would be like "Oh, everything is compared to Hitler!" Like, no. Listen. Do some fucking reading every once in awhile. It's an updated version of an old strategy. I'm waiting for the white women to start receiving medals for having Aryan kids, too.

I think Trump may be more dangerous when it comes down to it because he'll leave. It'll get to hard and he'll quit. Leaving the rest of the nation to falter under a system with no constraints since the Cabinet and admin will be stacked in favor and all opposition party areas will be redistricted again into smaller and smaller areas until squeezed out.

the parallels between the jewish registry in nazi germany and a muslim registry is frightening. And people said "it isn't such a big deal, we have to protect germany first from those ~bad jews.~" which is exactly is what being said now, "we have protect america from those ~bad muslims~ so lets all put them on the list." This is an obedience test. This is to see how far they can go, how far people will normalize and excuse it. Soon they'll make them wear badges, or have their faith listed on ID cards, if they don't "look muslim."

This country has really robust democratic institutions and we're also really not doing that badly, in terms of the economy and other factors. Unemployment is low, wages are relatively high. Germany before the rise of Hitler was basically a failed state. A third of the country was unemployed. They had never been a democracy before. It takes more than one man to cause that kind of evil.

I don't want to minimize Trump but I don't want people to become more frightened than they have to be.

I think the closer comparison is to far right nationalist parties in Europe today.

The History of WWII is a fantastic podcast that goes into great detail about the war, but the first episode alone was enough to frighten me because it's so reminiscent of our current election, including how Hitler's opponent won the popular vote.

i was watching a documentary a while back and this woman was talking about when she was a girl and her parents would talk about if they should really try to flee the country, just as things were starting to look like they might get crazy. she was saying how her dad would say, this guy hitler is just crazy, he's obviously not going to last much longer.

idk just something about it resonated with things now, like people thinking trump won't go much further, that decency will inevitably intervene, etc.

I'm a historian, and back when Brexit was official, I said something on my Facebook about how this is a bad trend for the world, especially with the state of the United States politics and Russia's warmongering policies. And some douchenozzle i knew from my childhood was like 'what do you mean, we are all taking our countries back!!'

I know history is cyclical. I know we can't escape our past, and there will always be a percentage of the population that isn't interested or doesnt care about the past. And honestly since I was a child, doing the math, i was afraid this would happen in my lifetime.

But dear god help us. I am legit terrified of what the world is moving towards.

(Additionally I am fully realizing I will probably never have children because of this and that hurts more than I thought it would)